In Middle Eastern art, mirrors are not simply a subject. They carry centuries of symbolism — from the glittering interiors of shrines to the intricate craft of āyeneh-kāri — and continue to shape contemporary practice. Today’s artists cut, tilt, and reassemble mirrors to question how we perceive space, the self, and the divine. Each turns reflection into something distinct: illusion, storytelling, geometry, or existential metaphor.

For Shirin Abedinirad, mirrors are portals that collapse earth and sky, body and spirit. In her installation Evocation (2013), placed in the Iranian desert, circles of mirrors embedded in sand shimmer like pools of water. At first, the viewer believes they are seeing an oasis, only to realise they are staring at the heavens inverted on the ground. The illusion is both playful and profound: a desert mirage that insists on the presence of the infinite.

In Heaven on Earth (2014), mirrored staircases rise toward the sky, transforming ordinary architecture into a celestial ladder. “For me, the use of mirrors is integral to creating a paradise; mirrors give light, an important mystical concept in Persian culture,” she explains.

Abedinirad’s practice is deeply rooted in the Persian tradition of light as a sacred force, yet her works belong fully to the present. They invite the viewer to step into a space where reflection is not passive but transformative: to see oneself inside nature, to touch the sublime in a shard of mirrored glass.

No discussion of mirrors in contemporary art from the region can bypass Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019). Revered as the pioneer who modernised the ancient Persian craft of āyeneh-kāri (mirror mosaic), she built an entire visual language out of light and geometry.

Her epiphany came in Shiraz in the 1970s, inside the glittering shrine of Shah Cheragh: “It was a universe unto itself, architecture transformed into performance, all movement and fluid light, all solids fractured and dissolved in brilliance in space, in prayer. I was overwhelmed”. From that moment, Farmanfarmaian dedicated herself to reinventing mirror-work as abstraction.

By combining Islamic geometric principles with the lessons of Western modernism (Picasso, Duchamp, and Matisse were her early references), she created luminous wall pieces and three-dimensional reliefs that fractured space into kaleidoscopic diamonds. Critics describe her mosaics as “a dance of a diamond under a microscope”.

Her works reflect not only the viewer but an entire history — the mystical cosmology of Iran, the rigour of Islamic geometry, and the restless innovation of contemporary sculpture. Today, her legacy endures in museums worldwide and in the dedicated Monir Museum in Tehran.

If mirrors are often about doubling and illusion, Faisal Samra approaches reflection as a metaphor for existence itself. A Bahrain-born, Saudi national artist, he refuses to separate art from life: “If I’m not an artist, then I don’t exist,” he states plainly.

Samra works across mediums — painting, photography, video, performance — but always with a focus on fragility, distortion, and perception.

At Desert X AlUla (2024), his installation The Dot unfolded a meditation on illusion. A line, he argued, is nothing but a sequence of dots. A dot, in turn, is the primal unit of all images. By monumentalising this idea in the desert, Samra invited viewers to reflect on the origins of perception itself.

For Samra, reflection is not just visual but existential: an endless negotiation between the fragment and the whole, between the individual point and the infinite horizon.

Aref Montazeri treats the mirror not as an accessory, but as a protagonist. “The mirror follows a narrative” — this is his approach.

Born in Tehran in 1986, Montazeri meticulously polishes both sides of his mirror fragments. Their reflective face seduces with immediacy, while their reverse — scratched, treated, or painted — carries its own independent meaning. This duality transforms his sculptures into paradoxes: works that both reveal and conceal.

His series Immortal Mirror draws on Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage,” in which a child first recognises its own image and constructs an ideal but unreachable version of self. Montazeri’s mirrors do not simply return the gaze — they fracture it, reminding us that identity is always a negotiation between what is seen and what is imagined.

Aref collaborated with Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and later apprenticed with Parviz Tanavoli, experiences that deeply shaped his practice. He says, “I practised elegance with Monir and technical possibility with Parviz.”

Montazeri’s work is a reminder that a mirror is never neutral. It seduces, it distorts, it narrates. Standing before his sculptures, the viewer becomes part of the story — but never its conclusion.